This is certainly the case with Silicon Valley pioneer HP, who divulged in a recent press briefing that it is currently negotiating with local telecom operators to "bundle" 3G-enabled laptops for mobile subscribers.

Displaying a unit that was type-approved by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), a requirement usually reserved for cellphones, HP executives said they expect demand for network-capable laptops to pick up by 2009.

Officials from the company’s Asia Pacific office in Japan said they are currently in talks with local carriers but clarified that there is no definite date yet for the active promotion of laptops that have SIM card slots. In other countries, however, mobile operators are already offering unlimited data package that have spurred 3G usage, they said.

Also under its wireless communications strategy, HP also said it is taking out the Bluetooth capability in its laptops and replacing it Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN), a form of wireless network that uses cellular network technologies such as WiMAX, GPRS, HSDPA, and 3G.

During the press event, company executives Alfred Au and Jae-won Sung revealed HP is also coming out with a new model that directly competes with the Eee PC, the surprise hit from Taiwanese firm Asus which triggered the emergence of netbooks or laptops that have solid state drives instead of hard drives.

HP is currently enjoying a runaway growth of its laptop line, with business expanding 75-percent faster than the industry rate, officials claimed. Quoting third-party sources, the company said its worldwide market share in third quarter of 2007 was 21.6 percent, followed by Acer at 15.5 percent, Dell at 13.7 percent, Toshiba at 10 percent, and Lenovo at 8.2 percent.

To make sure the market is fully covered, HP said is rolling out the broadest range of laptops that carry various innovations such as business card reader, integrated biometrics, and other types of privacy filters.

Another area which HP emphasized during the press event was the battery innovations that the company has implemented, which included a docklike battery pack that allows a laptop to continuously operate for 16 hours.

The officials stressed that HP, unlike other computer makers that were affected by the recall of defective batteries last year, was spared of the embarrassment of the incident because it buys only the cell component and designs its own battery pack.